Newspapers argue that Google’s news service violates copyright law

Copyright law interpretation sits at the center of yet another debate …

An international group of newspaper publishers claim that search engine indexing and content distribution constitutes copyright infringement. Located in Paris, the World Association of Newspapers is exploring legal options that will enable them to "challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners."

The organization feels that by displaying thumbnail images and excerpts from various news stories, search engines like Google benefit from the intellectual property of the news industry without having to give anything back in return. Ali Rahnema, managing director of the World Association of Newspapers, expressed his opinion in an interview:

"They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content. The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."

The association hopes to discuss the situation with the European Commission in order to determine what options are available. As we have previously reported, Agence France Presse (AFP) is suing Google here in America, seeking an order to force the company to stop indexing their content and pay them US$17.5 million.

Do the threats have any teeth? In the US, the use of image thumbnails has been protected as fair use, and three lines of content is hardly a substantial portion of the average news report. As such, Google's use of copyrighted news content clearly constitutes fair use, but local copyright law outside of the US may see things differently. Also problematic is the commercialization of many news link aggregators. While aggregators such as Google News do not contain explicit advertisements, the services can be seen as part of larger commercial enterprises—at least, this is an argument we expect to see. On the other hand, many would argue that the inclusion in something like Google's news search service potentially increases traffic, ultimately benefiting the content owners more than it benefits Google.

Attempting to sue Google for copyright infringement may be turning into a fad. A judge recently slapped down one man's quest to successfully sue Google for displaying his "poems" to users through the Google cache feature. Google's indexing system is automated, and because the poet published his materials on the web, the judge ruled that he had essentially provided Google with an implied license to index the content. In light of the judge's ruling, it looks like similar cases are probably doomed to failure as well.